War and Remembrance (65 page)

“Where’s Dad’s letter?”

“You want to read it right now?”

“Yes.”

The envelope was scuffed, the creases in the sheets of U. S. S.
Northampton
stationery were wearing through. Byron crouched in an armchair over the pages, written in his father’s familiar firm clear Navy hand with heavily crossed
t’s
and plain capitals.

Dearest Rhoda:

By now you have the official word. I tried a couple of times to place a call to you, but it probably was for the best that I didn’t get through. It might have been painful for both of us.

Our son made it through the worst of the battle. He would fly over my ship and rock his wings, coming back from sorties. Warren scored a direct bomb hit on a Jap carrier. He’ll probably get a posthumous Navy Cross. Rear Admiral Spruance told me this. Spruance is a controlled person, but when he spoke of Warren there were tears in his eyes. He said that Warren turned in a “brilliant, heroic performance,” and Raymond Spruance uses such words sparingly.

Warren was killed on the last day, on a routine mission of mopping up enemy cripples. An AA shell caught his plane. Three of his squadron mates saw him spin down in flames, so there’s no hope that he ditched and is afloat on a raft, or cast up on some atoll. Warren is dead, we will never see him again. We have Byron, we have Madeline, but he’s gone, and there will never be another Warren.

He came to see me just before the battle and gave me an envelope. When I found out he’d been killed (which wasn’t until we got back to port) I opened it. It contained a rundown of his finances. Not that Janice had to worry, but he wasn’t counting on his rich father-in-law. He’d arranged to transfer your mother’s trust fund to her, and there’s an insurance policy that guarantees Vic’s education. How about that? He exuded confidence and cheer before the battle. I know he expected to make it through. Yet he did this. I can still see him standing in the door of my cabin, with one hand on the overhead, one foot on the coaming, saying with that easy grin of his, “If you’re too busy for me, say so.” Too busy! God forgive me if I ever gave him that impression. There was no greater joy in my life than talking to Warren, in fact just resting my eyes on him.

It’s been awhile since I’ve heard from you, and almost six months since Madeline last wrote. So I feel sort of cut off, and don’t know what to advise you. If you can stay with her in New York for a while, it might be a good idea. That girl needs somebody, and this is no time for you to be alone on Foxhall Road. Janice is behaving well, but she’s kind of smashed up. Byron will probably mask his feelings as usual, but I’m worried about him. He worshipped Warren.

I’ve just written my ship’s battle report. It’s one page long. We never fired
a gun. We never saw an enemy vessel. Warren must have flown a dozen search and attack sorties in three days. He and a few hundred young men like him carried the brunt of a great victorious battle. I did nothing.

Somewhere a character. in Shakespeare says, “We owe God a death.” Even if we could roll time back to that rainy evening in March 1939, Rhoda, when he was on leave from the
Monaghan,
and he told us he was putting in for flight training — in his typical fashion, just like that, no fuss, confronting us with the
fait accompli
— and even if we knew what the future held in store, what could we do differently? He was born to a service father. Boys tend to follow their dads. He chose the best branch of the Navy for effectiveness against the enemy; certainly he proved that! Few men in any armed force, on any front, will strike a harder blow for their country than he did. That was what he set out to do. His life was successful, fulfilled, and complete. I want to believe that, and in a way I truly do.

But ah, what Warren might have been! I’m a known quantity. There are a thousand four-stripers like me, and one more or less doesn’t matter that much. I’ve had my family; you might say I’ve had my life. How can I compare to what Warren might have been?

Yes, Warren’s gone. He won’t have any fame. When the war’s over, nobody will remember the ones who bore the heat of combat. They’ll probably forget the names of the admirals, even of the battles that saved our country. I now feel that despite all the present discouraging news we’ll eventually win the war. The Japs can’t recover from the shellacking they took at Midway, and Hitler can’t lick the world by himself. Our son helped to turn the tide. He was there when it mattered and where it mattered. He took his life in his hands, went in there, and did his duty as a fighting man. I’m proud of him. I’ll never lose that pride. He’ll be in my last thoughts.

Other things will have to wait for a different letter. God keep you well.

Love,

Pug

Emerging from her room in a silk robe, Rhoda said, “Isn’t it a beautiful letter?” Byron did not reply. He sat smoking a cigar, staring emptily, his face wan, the letter on his lap. Disturbed by his silence and his look, she chattered cheerily, combing her hair at a large mirror. “I’m saving it. I’m saving everything — the telegram, the letter from the Secretary of the Navy, all the other letters, even the invitation from the Gold Star Mothers, and the story in the
Washington Herald.
It’s a nice write-up. Now what is this party again, Byron? Isn’t she working for Hugh Cleveland any more? I’m all confused, and — oh, to
HELL
with this hair! There’s no light, and no time, and I don’t
care,
anyhow.”

“She is working for him. This party’s something else, a volunteer thing.” Byron got up, took a red and yellow circular from a pile on the coffee table, and handed it to her. “It’s a buffet before this wingding starts.”

AMERICAN COMMITTEE

FOB

A SECOND FRONT
NOW

Hollywood Division

MONSTER RALLY

AT

THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL

There followed a large alphabetical list of participants: film stars, producers, directors, writers.

“My goodness! What a star cast. And Alistair Tudsbury, too,
HE’S
here! Why, this is a very distinguished group, isn’t it, Byron?
’Madeline Henry, program coordinator!’
My heavens! If that little snip hasn’t come up in the world.”

At this moment Madeline burst in. “Oh, Mother!” The intensity of the exclamation, and the clutching embrace that went with it, bridged their shared grief. She wore a dark wide-shouldered dress, her dark hair was elegantly styled, and her talk was cyclonic. “I’m so
GLAD
you came! Shoot, I hoped you’d be ready, but I’ll just go, I guess, and then send Hugh’s limousine back for you. Oh, God, there’s so much to talk about, isn’t there, Mom! This insane clambake will be all over tonight, thank Heaven, and then I can draw breath.”

“Dear, we don’t know these people, I’m tired, I have no clothes —”

“Mama, you’re both
coming.
The Tudsburys will be sitting in your box. That’s why they’ve stayed on, they want to see you. They won’t be at the party, but you’ll meet all the film stars. It’s at Harry Tomlin’s home on Lookout Mountain, a fabulous place, he’s the biggest agent in the movie business. Wear anything! You must have a black suit.”

“Well, I wore it to death on the train, but —” Rhoda went out.

Byron pointed to the pile of circulars. “Mad, isn’t that a communist outfit?”

“Sweetie, not on your life. All Hollywood’s in on it. It’s a popular movement. With Soviet Russia doing all the real fighting and dying against Hitler, we
need
a second front now, and we’ve got to raise hell about it. Everybody knows Churchill hates the Bolsheviks, and wants to hold back and let the Soviet Union bleed itself white, fighting the Germans alone.”

“Everybody knows that? I don’t know it. How do you know it?”

“Oh, Lord, Byron, read your newspapers. Anyway, let’s not argue, sweetie, it’s not worth arguing about. I took this thing on because I thought it would be fun, and it
has
been fun in a bloodcurdling way. I’ve made some fantastic contacts. I don’t want to be Hugh Cleveland’s little sandwich-fetcher forever.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

Madeline was making a long strident telephone call about the rally to a
man she called “Lenny, darling,” when Rhoda marched in, buttoning her jacket. “Let’s go. Nobody will pay me the slightest attention. I’ll pass as someone’s poor aunt from Dubuque.”

The home of Harry Tomlin was an opulent sprawl of redwood and glass angled around a flagstone terrace with a huge blue-tiled pool. Perched at the end of a scarily steep concrete road up into a canyon, it commanded a spectacular view of Los Angeles, which at the moment looked like a drowned city shimmering at the bottom of a brown lake. Madeline vanished in the babbling throng of guests, after introducing her mother and brother at the door to a man named Leonard Spreregen, the rally chairman, who — so she told them — had won two Academy Awards for screenplays. Rhoda saw that her concern over clothes was needless; Spreregen wore no tie, and his orange shirt collar flowed over his black and white houndstooth jacket. Madeline whirled into sight again and introduced her mother and brother to one star after another, all of whom were most cordial. To the astonished Rhoda they appeared peculiarly shrunken, seen as human beings rather than blown-up moving shadows.

“How on earth have you gotten to know them all, dear?” she exclaimed, catching her breath after a kind word and a smile from Ronald Colman.

“Oh, you do, Mom, when you mix into a thing like this. You just do. That’s the fun of it. Ah, there we go.”

White-coated butlers were sliding tall Chinese panels into wall slots, disclosing a long dining room and a heavily laden buffet table, where two chefs were sharpening knives over steaming hams and turkeys. As the guests drifted in toward the food, several men in sharply tailored Army uniforms fell into the line behind Madeline. She whispered to Byron that these were Hollywood types making training films. Hugh Cleveland was looking into this angle, she said. He had received a draft notice; if things got sticky he wanted an out. She blurted this artlessly, then caught the look on her brother’s face. “Well, I realize how that must strike you, but —”

“How does it strike you, Madeline?”

“Briny, Hugh is totally unmechanical. He can’t sharpen a pencil properly. He’d be an utter washout carrying a gun.”

They brought their food to a little table on the terrace, where Leonard Spreregen joined them and talked with Madeline about the rally while she scratched notes on a pad. Spreregen’s manner was bright and edgy, his speech pure New York. Madeline exclaimed, jumping up, “Omigawd, the trumpeters for the mass chant, of
course.
Sorry, Lenny. I
knew
there was something. Be right back.”

“What a lovely party,” Rhoda said to Spreregen, glancing around at French impressionist paintings crusting the walls, “and what a gorgeous home!”

He pleasantly smiled. He was a short lean man with thick curly blond
hair and a hawklike face. His voice was deep, almost bass. “Well, Mrs. Henry, ten percent of my heart’s blood is in it, but I don’t mind, Harry’s a terrific agent. Say, Lieutenant, how do you feel about the second front?”

“Well, I’m puzzled,” Byron said, eating away at a heaped plate, “there are four or five fronts right now, aren’t there?”

“Ah, the military precisionist speaks!” Spreregen nodded, with a keen glance at Byron that took in the ribbons and the dolphins. “ ‘The Committee for a Second Front against Germany in France Now’ would be more exact, I guess. People know what we mean. You’re for that, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know if it’s feasible now.”

“Why, any number of military authorities are clamoring for it.”

“But the Allied chiefs of staff are the military authorities that matter.”

“Exactly so,” said Spreregen, as though to a clever pupil, “and the chiefs of staff can’t buck their political bosses. Economic and political motives can cause stupid military decisions, Lieutenant. Then you fighting men have to pay the price. The reactionaries want to let Hitler destroy the Soviet Union, before they finish him off. The reactionaries have a strong voice, but the voice of the people is stronger. That’s why rallies like this are vital.”

Byron shook his head, saying mildly, “I doubt they can affect strategic policy. Why not put on a rally for the Jews in Europe? Such big propaganda shows might do them some real good.”

Rhoda blinked at her son. At the word “Jews,” Leonard Spreregen’s eyes clouded, his mouth tightened, and he sat up straight, putting down the knife and fork on a slab of hot ham. “If you’re serious —”

“I’m deadly serious.”

Spreregen spoke fast, in a rattled way. “Well, I’m not sure what’s happening over there, my friend, I don’t think anybody here really knows, but the way to end all that misery is by smashing Hitler with a second front now.”

“I see,” Byron said.

“Excuse me. Nice meeting you,” Spreregen said to Rhoda, and he departed, leaving his food behind.

Soon Madeline appeared, frowning at Byron. “Look, Briny, let’s drop you off at the hotel on the way to the rally.”